My glass shall not persuade me I am old, So long as youth and thou are of one date; But when in thee time's furrows I behold, Then look I death my days should expiate.
As a viewed myself in a fragment of looking-glass..., I was so impressed with a sense of vague awe at my appearance ... that I was seized with a violent tremour.
Patriotism cannot be our final spiritual shelter; my refuge is humanity. I will not buy glass for the price of diamonds, and I will never allow patriotism to triumph over humanity as long as I live.
Bog-lights, vapors of mysticism, psychic overtones, soul orgies, wailings among the shadows, weird gnosticisms, veils and tissues of words, gibbering subjectivisms, gropings and maunderings, ontological fantasies ... this is the stuff, the phantasms of hope, that fills your book shelves. Look at them, all the sad wraiths of sad mad men and passionate rebels — your Schopenhauers, your Strindbergs, your Tolstois and Nietzsches. Come. Your glass is empty. Fill and forget.
An optimist will tell you the glass is half-full; the pessimist, half-empty; and the engineer will tell you the glass is twice the size it needs to be.
"What is your best, your very best, ale a glass?" "Two pence halfpenny," says the landlord, "is the price of the Genuine Stunning Ale." "Then," says I, producing the money, "just draw me a glass of the Genuine Stunning, if you please, with a good head on it."
More and more do I feel, as I advance in life, how little we really know of each other. Friendship seems to me like the touch of musical-glasses--it is only contact; but the glasses themselves, and their contents, remain quite distinct and unmingled.